Also just lol at 'turned the vineyard over to subsistence crops' - no they fucking didn't. The Stellenbosch vineyards, like most vineyards, are mostly on shitty soil on ridiculous slopes, completely unusable for almost any other kind of agriculture. I guess they could have grassed it over and grown sheep, but that was, uh, not what the South Africans did. The climate there's bad for sheep, anyway.
They just, y'know, used the actual good agricultural soil they'd murdered the black citizens for secured. After they deliberately fed most of their population to the ghouls, it wasn't like they needed all that much food, anyway. They might have uprooted some of the flat land vineyards, but the majority were untouched. There's even fucking photos of them, complete with wandering ghouls.
To be fair I think there was a couple of photo ops that implied that they were doing this, but as in most of wine producing Europe, where it was done it was more performance than reality. Like, there are areas of previously wine producing regions where local bigwigs will make a big performance of how they're turning the luxury wine production over into food crops to show how we're All In It Together, and then like, not actually do that?
Like, apart from anything else, they also need to keep the booze flowing. A lot of post war combat units would fucking shut down if they didn't have at least some booze flowing into them, either directly (as in most French government units) or indirectly (as in Royalist and American units where the boozing happens when they're out of rotation.)
In really badly hit areas, the vineyards are just abandoned so people can work on crops to eat. Or people eat the grapes.
There's a reason the French government were so desperate to triumphantly retake Paris - it was their only hope of even managing to placate the survivors on the mainland. Even then, the Sixth Republic is federal, and doesn't even pretend to rule in places like Brittany. They fucked it.
It's absolutely obvious for anybody who's looked at the actual records of the time that the U.S. needed to have a push to "reclaim" the land East of the Rockies because otherwise it was simply a matter of time before they entirely collapsed and/or completely lost territory to the various successor states. And I'd say their hold on a lot of that area even now is more...tenuous then they'd ever like to admit. Unless something drastic happens, I think all they've really done is buy themselves some time.
From what I've heard - which isn't a lot, but I've exchanged letters with some of them - the degree to which most of those units would've stayed "loyal" without being the ones to reclaim Paris is dubious.
The lost cities - the truly, genuinely lost ones, the big ones without any survivors; Paris, London, Tokyo, Buenos Aires - chewed up soldiers who always go in hoping they'll be the one to find the survivors that must be there, because the city was so huge, how could they all be dead?
It's always a bloodbath, but you never run out of volunteers, people desperately hoping it'll turn out to be a New York instead. If you're a loyalist French soldier who fled with the government and during the reunification feels deep in your soul that you failed your people? You go to Paris. If the government doesn't let you? You still go to Paris.
Would it be crass to point out the imagery of a conference of the UN being held not only on an American military installation entirely under the control of the US Navy, but also that installation being a rusting hulk, dark and squalid?
But like, this is how our propaganda would present the conference where the Americans dictated terms to their ever-shrinking group of allies/victims. They don't see it that way, though. They think this shows "grit" and their hardscrabble valour.
For people living overseas: There's a strong sentiment here in America that things were better before zombies, therefore things should return to normal ASAP, therefore it's a good idea to embrace anything that looks like a return to normalcy.
The fact that "normalcy" looks like America trying to dictate military strategy for the rest of the world...well, to people who remember 9/11 and its consequences, it's not surprising.
Mkunga Lalem is shit, too - you do not need a martial art to fight ghouls. If you have a weapon, you hit the ghoul in the head with it. If you do not have a weapon, you jog in the opposite direction. I have distilled anti-ghoul close quarters combat to the essentials.
My understanding is that about half of Mkunga Lalem is wrestling techniques for escaping holds. Like, sport-wrestling, not pro-wrestling. I could see that being useful if you get grabbed by one or two zombies before you can job in the opposite direction.
But the other half is mystical nonsense and limb strikes designed to either stall a zombie's attack or let it bits your calf after you trip it. The one guy I know who's a Mkunga Lalem proponent is annoyed at all the focus on the zombie-killing strikes.
Article:
when I heard another American voice. It was their president. The man didn't shout, didn't try to restore order. He just kept going in that calm, firm tone that I don't think any world leader has since been able to duplicate.
I hope even the most jingoistic Americans can recognize this as obvious propaganda. The author knows writers who use subtext, and thinks they're cowards.
Article:
The bottle in Renard's hand might be the last of its kind, the perfect symbol of a world we might never see again. It was the only personal item he'd managed to save during the evacuation. He carried it with him everywhere, and was planning to save it for . . . ever, possibly, seeing as it looked like none of any vintage would ever be made again. But now, after the Yankee president's speech . . .
Is the implication here meant to be that Commander Renard thought the American was so inspiring, he was now suddenly more confident that the vineyard would produce wine again?
Because like, I think that's the intended reading, when the far more obvious reason a soldier might decide to say "fuck it" and crack open a rare vintage after it becomes clear his country is about to be dragged into a high casualty, high risk, low reward campaign. It isn't because he thinks they'll win, it's because he knows he won't survive it.
No, the economic heartland of Chile is not suddenly the second largest city on an island off the coast only accessible by ferry. Might as well say the economic centre of America is fucking Aspen.
Have I complained recently about how Brooks conceives of a post-zombie world where the only surviving cities of any meaningful size are the ones with ironclad defenses against zombies. (See also: "The world's most populous city" being in the middle of the Himalayas. Or how the Renfield Plan was conceived of as a brilliant martial strategy and not a logistical/political catastrophe.)
Brooks isn't ignorant to the importance of food; I'm pretty sure it's mentioned before in WWZ, and he definitely brings it up several times in the Zombie Survival Guide. But it seems like he thinks of it as a trivial problem. "If you're dumb you'll starve, but if you put in a little hard work you'll be able to feed yourself with only a little planning. The real problems are the ones that can only be solved by military force."
Article:
Stellenboch was now growing subsistence crops. Grapes were considered a luxury when the population was close to starvation.
Speaking of food...I admit that I don't know much about premodern Mediterranean agriculture, but I remember historians talking about grapes and olives as being important parts of their diet. Not staples like grain, but important. And maybe something about them growing well in drier, hillier areas that aren't so good for barley or wheat?
More evidence that Brooks has no idea what he's talking about. Staple crops are usually the best, in terms of calories-per-acre on average farmland, but they're not the best everywhere and they're not sufficient to keep people alive.
Hopefully this one's good? Brooks literally having a character turn to camera and say "people who argue America is privileged are wrong because CHINA and also just want REVENGE for the past, which is bad" is genuinely one of the more repulsive things he does in this book.
Yeah, um. The politics in this book are not subtle, and they dethrone the fortress-first worldbuilding as the most cringeworthy and ill-considered thing in the book.
I'm not sure how much sense it makes to distinguish between the explicit politics of characters saying things to the camera from the implicit politics of the Redeker Plan being a good idea. It's all the same neoreactionary snarl, you know?
I bet five SRGL bucks that they are also using "the United Nations". By which I mean "an organization calling itself the United Nations and framing itself as the continuation or successor to the pre-Z UN".
I'm not sure how much sense it makes to distinguish between the explicit politics of characters saying things to the camera from the implicit politics of the Redeker Plan being a good idea. It's all the same neoreactionary snarl, you know?
I more mean like...Redeker is an obvious fictional element. It's fucking stupid, but you can look at it and maybe just go 'Ok maybe Mr. Brooks just didn't think that one through, or he thought it'd be thematically important, or maybe he's just kinda dumb on military stuff and didn't realize the situation he's crafted isn't quite as apocalyptic as it's made out to be.' It's believable that it doesn't reflect too much on Brooks as a person or his personal politics as a writer. People make dumb worldbuilding and plot decisions all the time, and it usually doesn't make them bad people.
But having a dude looking at the camera and go "Also, by the way, the enduring legacy of Colonialism and the hegemonic rule of European descended states isn't actually real, because China" or an entire chapter about how "Cubans actually secretly yearn to return to Capitalism" aren't accidental. Those are the Author directly putting their rancid, ignorant political opinion on the page and into the mouth of a convenient character.
Redeker, if you're reading the book critically, can probably be ignored as 'Yeah it's a dumb and kinda edgy idea but there's a bunch of cool Horror stuff so I can mostly ignore it', while the overt political stuff just slaps you in the face with the fact that Redeker wasn't an accident.
From what I've heard - which isn't a lot, but I've exchanged letters with some of them - the degree to which most of those units would've stayed "loyal" without being the ones to reclaim Paris is dubious.
The lost cities - the truly, genuinely lost ones, the big ones without any survivors; Paris, London, Tokyo, Buenos Aires - chewed up soldiers who always go in hoping they'll be the one to find the survivors that must be there, because the city was so huge, how could they all be dead?
It's always a bloodbath, but you never run out of volunteers, people desperately hoping it'll turn out to be a New York instead. If you're a loyalist French soldier who fled with the government and during the reunification feels deep in your soul that you failed your people? You go to Paris. If the government doesn't let you? You still go to Paris.
Guilt is hell of a thing, can imagine all the societies of warzs world have to deal with the fact that a lot chaos just happens randomly from people just temporarily/permanently breaking down from PTSD and other mental scars?
I bet five SRGL bucks that they are also using "the United Nations". By which I mean "an organization calling itself the United Nations and framing itself as the continuation or successor to the pre-Z UN".
OOC: Mkunga Lalem gets detailed in the Zombie Survival Guide, it was developed by the Zulu and is an armed combat style using traditional Zulu weapons like the assegai.
IC:
Oh yes, the Saratoga Conference. This was the real beginning for World War Z, at least from our perspective.
As soon as the votes came in: double and quadruple shifts, mandatory overtime, 'accelerated programs,' lots of new requisition orders... constant shortages of resources, manpower and spare parts. DeStRes worked around the clock. Raising a force of tens or hundreds of thousands in a hurry, effectively from scratch, was a monumental logistical challenge when we were only just getting on our feet again and transitioning away from an informal, ad hoc, survival economy.
I have sympathy for the Soviet effort to move somewhere between a tenth to an eight of their industry behind the Urals when they were fighting to reclaim their homeland. What they accomplished can boggle the mind: disassembling and reassembling all the infrastructure that makes a factory - production shops, railway lines, water and power supplies, materials, plans, instructions - combined with extreme vertical integration as the industrial sector sought to become self-sufficient (severed from their sub-contractors as they were), while simultaneously handling the mining surveys to find new resource deposits to make up for what they had lost to the Germans in iron ore, coal, steel, copper, aluminum, manganese...
Comparatively speaking, though? I felt they had it easy! Years of crash industrialization meant that centrally planned development and building up factories on empty fields was old hat to the Soviets. They knew how to put together crash courses to convert large segments of their population into emergency technicians. And at least they'd had the cohesiveness to evacuate their industries as they retreated - something like 1500 factories moved over hundreds of miles to be reassembled.
Meanwhile, most of our stuff languished in Red Zones beyond the Rockies. We learned as we went, which necessarily caused some, uh, 'waste and inefficiency,' to use the polite term.
For all of that, though? Fighting to reclaim individual cities, holding down quarantines, defending islands - that's power. There were a number of countries - old and new - who managed that against Zack.
Supplying three Army Groups across a front hundreds of miles wide, as they fought all the way to the Atlantic, clearing out the bulk of North America's infestation from Hope to New York - and then going on to supply allies on different continents once we'd rejiggered the convoy structure and DSCC reopened the harbors for deepwater shipping? That was superpower.
What we achieved isn't quite unique in human history, but it was certainly remarkable.
Wait how would this even work as a propaganda argument, I though WWZ zombies had a spooky inability to decompose, regular bacteria and fungi and what not having zero interest in throwing down with the mysterious possibly extraterrestrial zed virus (and being straight up supernatural in the reviewers own opinion)? Unless they meant like purely mechanical like erosion-ish decomposition from slowly slowly shaking their corpses apart shambling from noise to noise and getting beat down by inclement weather and etc...?
I hope even the most jingoistic Americans can recognize this as obvious propaganda. The author knows writers who use subtext, and thinks they're cowards.
Credit where credit's due, either the interviewee or the editor did a darn fine job of turning that pessimism into its polar opposite.
OOC
Have I complained recently about how Brooks conceives of a post-zombie world where the only surviving cities of any meaningful size are the ones with ironclad defenses against zombies. (See also: "The world's most populous city" being in the middle of the Himalayas. Or how the Renfield Plan was conceived of as a brilliant martial strategy and not a logistical/political catastrophe.)
Brooks isn't ignorant to the importance of food; I'm pretty sure it's mentioned before in WWZ, and he definitely brings it up several times in the Zombie Survival Guide. But it seems like he thinks of it as a trivial problem. "If you're dumb you'll starve, but if you put in a little hard work you'll be able to feed yourself with only a little planning. The real problems are the ones that can only be solved by military force."
Speaking of food...I admit that I don't know much about premodern Mediterranean agriculture, but I remember historians talking about grapes and olives as being important parts of their diet. Not staples like grain, but important. And maybe something about them growing well in drier, hillier areas that aren't so good for barley or wheat?
More evidence that Brooks has no idea what he's talking about. Staple crops are usually the best, in terms of calories-per-acre on average farmland, but they're not the best everywhere and they're not sufficient to keep people alive.
The problem with grapes and other easily perishable fruits and vegetables is labour.
Even if there's no mechanised farming equipment, it still takes relatively more labour to squeeze out nutrients in the form of grapes than in wheat.
It's why America only uses 2% of it's arable land to grow FFNV and why monasteries were the ones exploring wine.
Note that you can't easily transpose ancient or medieval practices to modern day too . Grapes in the past were usually dried for preservation, meaning modern imperfections that would see them discarded would have been accepted.
Translating that to a zombie apocalypse.... Well, that gets complicated.
Wait how would this even work as a propaganda argument, I though WWZ zombies had a spooky inability to decompose, regular bacteria and fungi and what not having zero interest in throwing down with the mysterious possibly extraterrestrial zed virus (and being straight up supernatural in the reviewers own opinion)?
"Almost all the microbe species involved in normal human decomposition have repeatedly rejected flesh infected by the virus, effectively embalming the zombie. Were this not the case, combating the living dead would be as easy as avoiding them for several weeks or even days until they rotted away to hones. Research has yet to discover the exact cause of this condition. It has been determined that at least some microbe species ignore the repelling effects of Solanum-otherwise, the undead would remain perfectly preserved forever. It has also been determined that natural conditions such as moisture and temperature play an important role as well."
...
"Tests are ongoing to determine which of the many microorganisms normally involved in decomposition continue to consume flesh in spite of its infected nature. If these microbes can be isolated, reproduced, and delivered in a manner not harmful to its user, they could be humanity's first weapon of mass destruction in the battle against the living dead."
"Almost all the microbe species involved in normal human decomposition have repeatedly rejected flesh infected by the virus, effectively embalming the zombie. Were this not the case, combating the living dead would be as easy as avoiding them for several weeks or even days until they rotted away to hones. Research has yet to discover the exact cause of this condition. It has been determined that at least some microbe species ignore the repelling effects of Solanum-otherwise, the undead would remain perfectly preserved forever. It has also been determined that natural conditions such as moisture and temperature play an important role as well."
...
"Tests are ongoing to determine which of the many microorganisms normally involved in decomposition continue to consume flesh in spite of its infected nature. If these microbes can be isolated, reproduced, and delivered in a manner not harmful to its user, they could be humanity's first weapon of mass destruction in the battle against the living dead."
I more mean like...Redeker is an obvious fictional element. It's fucking stupid, but you can look at it and maybe just go 'Ok maybe Mr. Brooks just didn't think that one through, or he thought it'd be thematically important, or maybe he's just kinda dumb on military stuff and didn't realize the situation he's crafted isn't quite as apocalyptic as it's made out to be.' It's believable that it doesn't reflect too much on Brooks as a person or his personal politics as a writer. People make dumb worldbuilding and plot decisions all the time, and it usually doesn't make them bad people.
But having a dude looking at the camera and go "Also, by the way, the enduring legacy of Colonialism and the hegemonic rule of European descended states isn't actually real, because China" or an entire chapter about how "Cubans actually secretly yearn to return to Capitalism" aren't accidental. Those are the Author directly putting their rancid, ignorant political opinion on the page and into the mouth of a convenient character.
Redeker, if you're reading the book critically, can probably be ignored as 'Yeah it's a dumb and kinda edgy idea but there's a bunch of cool Horror stuff so I can mostly ignore it', while the overt political stuff just slaps you in the face with the fact that Redeker wasn't an accident.
I guess? Kinda? I can see why someone might want to distinguish between things that are vocally political and things that are accidentally political. I just...don't think it's a particularly meaningful distinction.
First off, we need to establish something: Not all things said by characters are things the audience believes, not even direct political statements.
For instance, look at this quote from Animal Farm, a direct political statement made by Squealer on behalf of Napoleon.
Squealer said:
Do not imagine, comrades, that leadership is a pleasure. On the contrary, it is a deep and heavy responsibility. No one believes more firmly than Comrade Napoleon that all animals are equal. He would be only too happy to let you make your decisions for yourselves. But sometimes you might make the wrong decisions, comrades, and then where should we be?
This is a pretty straightforward defense of dictatorship. Does this mean George Orwell thinks dictators are justified? To answer that question, we need to actually read Animal Farm, interpret what the text is saying, and come to some sort of conclusion based on that conclusion. Same deal with Max Brooks.
To be clear, I do think the stuff Ernesto Olguin says about India, China, and "white hegemony" is stuff Max Brooks believes. I'm just saying that the reason I think that is more complicated than "The guy Max made up said so".
TL;DR: We should only think political arguments made by characters are representative of an author's political beliefs when that assumption is supported by how that author wrote the rest of the text. But that means we can look at that rest of the text and see what political beliefs it seems to support. At the very least, we can assume that Max Brooks thinks the Redeker Plan would be effective at its goals, without serious negative side effects. And since the Redeker Plan is 100% mundane—no magic, no super-science, not even any exploitation of what makes zombies undead—that has serious political implications, which have already been discussed at length in this thread.
But of course, just as not everything a character says is something the author believes, not everything that happens in a story is something the author believes is plausible. Look at ZOM 100, a manga/anime where a salaryman who spent three years being overworked at a marketing firm has a big fun post-apocalyptic vacation, with hardly a care in the world beyond whatever zombies are currently attacking him and whatever fun thing he wants to do next. Does Haro Aso think this is a likely outcome for some dude who played rugby in college? Probably not.
However, both the Zombie Survival Guide and World War Z present themselves as being grounded, verisimilitudinous takes on the zombie apocalypse. They deliberately avert or subvert plenty of action-movie cliches, try to focus on ordinary people instead of Heroes with Big Stories, and...well, just look at the prose, at how long Brooks spends explaining details that justify some of the things he says happened. Contrast that with ZOM 100, where a giant great white shark turns into a zombie and runs around on land because the legs of the divers it ate are sticking out of its belly for some reason.
One of these narratives clearly thinks it's telling a realistic story, and it's the one where China spent half a billion dollars putting a useless bomb into orbit to screw over all of humanity if they felt like it. And the fact that Max Brooks seems to think it's realistic has political implications. It is, in fact, one of the reasons I'm inclined to believe the Sinophobia-tinged argument Olguin spits out for why imperialism doesn't exist. It's all connected.
The politics of WWZ, like any story, are holistic. Trying to reverse engineer political beliefs from any one part is absurd; that logic would support absurd arguments like "George Lucas is pro-fascism; look at the Nazis in Indiana Jones and the Empire in Star Wars!" That's why I don't think it makes sense to separate the explicit politics of Brooks's characters from the implicit politics of his worldbuilding. It would be entirely possible for someone to write a book like WWZ where the interviewees made those kinds of absurd political claims, and then oppose those claims with the worldbuilding. Max Brooks does the opposite, and that's why we say he put his reactionary beliefs into his characters instead of saying he wrote some reactionary characters.
OOC: Mkunga Lalem gets detailed in the Zombie Survival Guide, it was developed by the Zulu and is an armed combat style using traditional Zulu weapons like the assegai.
That makes a good deal more sense than an unarmed martial art. I just wasn't willing to bank on Brooks realizing that martial arts with spears and other ordinary weapons existed.
Point 1: That's changed in veteranMortal's version or WWZ, not Max Brooks's. Brooks makes a point out of how artillery shells are useless because his favorite made-up medical problems don't affect zombies.
Point 2: veteranMortal only changed that because it was stupid. Zombies rotting, albeit slowly, makes sense; otherwise, they wouldn't look rotten. And if they don't look rotten, are they even still zombies?
Point 1: That's changed in veteranMortal's version or WWZ, not Max Brooks's. Brooks makes a point out of how artillery shells are useless because his favorite made-up medical problems don't affect zombies.
Point 2: veteranMortal only changed that because it was stupid. Zombies rotting, albeit slowly, makes sense; otherwise, they wouldn't look rotten. And if they don't look rotten, are they even still zombies?
Yes, veteranMortal making changes is the entire point of my post. I'm saying that since she's changing a few things, including the whole explosives issue or their sensory capabilities, that the mechanics from the Survival Guide cannot be taken as necessarily true.
The politics of WWZ, like any story, are holistic. Trying to reverse engineer political beliefs from any one part is absurd; that logic would support absurd arguments like "George Lucas is pro-fascism; look at the Nazis in Indiana Jones and the Empire in Star Wars!" That's why I don't think it makes sense to separate the explicit politics of Brooks's characters from the implicit politics of his worldbuilding. It would be entirely possible for someone to write a book like WWZ where the interviewees made those kinds of absurd political claims, and then oppose those claims with the worldbuilding. Max Brooks does the opposite, and that's why we say he put his reactionary beliefs into his characters instead of saying he wrote some reactionary characters.
Yes obviously, Redeker is part of a recurring pattern of Hard Men Making Hard Decisions Cowards running away and leaving civilians to die being presented as a good thing, and that says a lot about Brook's beliefs in writing the book. The whole Chinese satellite thing is part of a pattern of Sinophobia. Brook's worldbuilding ends up lining up with his shitty political views-they are connected, obviously.
But there's a difference between 'Wow, this book has some really problematic Subtext, I wonder how much of that's intentional' and 'Wow this book just had a Chilean guy straight up say "American Economic Imperialism doesn't exist because China bad''
One is problematic subtext that probably says bad things about the Author's politics. The other is the Author going 'In case you didn't see the subtext, here's a guy straight up doing racist whataboutism."
I find this both worse writing and really dampening the quality of the book, because at the end of the day Subtext can be ignored or headcanoned around. It's a lot harder to enjoy a book when a guy just straight up says 'Yeah Racism isn't real' and you get the distinct impression the Author agrees with him. It's easy to pretend Redeker is just the author being stupid and move on to something fun. It's a lot harder to do so when the author constantly overtly reminding you 'No, that wasn't me being dumb, this is what I really believe'
It genuinely seems like Max Brooks bought hard into the kind of elitist borderline-conservatism that liberalism in America was for a while, and I do wonder if some of it came from his privileged background and perhaps some level of trying to differentiate himself from a proudly anti-fascist comedian/satirist father.
I do kind of wonder if he grew up with Stallone and Hulk Hogan, watched Jack Bauer in college, was a nerdy Jewish kid, and had a dad who was the funnyman who worked in humanizing and empathetic comedy, if that contributed to this book. I haven't watched a ton of Mel Brooks movies, but what I have seen is fascists and bigots generally treated (much like many others in his flicks) as jokes, as pathetic losers.
Maybe he wanted to be his own man, he didn't really have the social lack-of-stature to emphasize with people implicitly "below" him, and he wanted to be a big man or a real artist talking about real hardcore shit, not wacky comedy. Hence the weird pseudo-fascism and the uncomfortably bigoted understanding of anything outside of the LA-NY bubble, especially given the time.
If a kid grows up under the heavy shadow of Dark Helmet, is it really that weird if he starts to get into the idea of the God-Emperor of Mankind?
And that's when it got ugly. Many of the colder countries were what you used to call "First World." One of the delegates from a prewar "developing" country suggested, rather hotly, that maybe this was their punishment for raping and pillaging the "victim nations of the south." Maybe, he said, by keeping the "white hegemony" distracted with their own problems, the undead invasion might allow the rest of the world to develop "without imperialist intervention." Maybe the living dead had brought more than just devastation to the world. Maybe in the end, they had brought justice for the future.
All that's missing is the delegate having dyed pink hair.
It genuinely is fascinating to see the exact sort of caricature that reactionaries would continually deploy a few years later kind of blue-printed here. Of course, that wasn't a new trope and hadn't been for decades, the kind of person that would take the concept of perhaps well-meaning people who took social justice Too Far, as opposed to the pragmatic Centrists who understood that everybody must be given an Appropriate Due and that equal treatment would be achieved in Due Time (if they were lucky and the people in power cared enough). But its so stark in its deployment here, through having a strawman spout a frankly absurd position that even if people believed it (or at least spread it via internal propaganda, likely to keep people's spirits up in an age of mass death and economic collapse) they would never actually say at any sort of meeting between nations, with a collection of vaguely appropriate buzzwords that still seem really weird in the context they're being deployed- like you could definitely make a decent case that the ravaging of "developing countries" by the "First World" would leave them more likely to be victimized by a zombie plague, but it feels like something that would have to be put aside for pragmatism reasons if nothing else, not something that a delegate, presumably there for diplomatic reasons, would rant about with seemingly no contextual referent.
And it's honestly being deployed in exactly the same way as the reactionaries would later- laugh at the stupid people that think there is any kind of unfair imperialistic hegemony, or that the West unfairly victimized developing countries, influenced their governmental or economic development, etc. etc. etc. because they're just Silly. It's just kind of interesting to see the way that Centrist Respectable Liberals would use the exact same sort of rhetoric with no irony that would be deployed by the fascists and reactionary borderline-fascists just a few years later, with seemingly no irony whatsoever.
Now, my people have little love for the northern gringos, and my family suffered enough under Pinochet to make that animosity personal, but there comes a point where private emotions must give way to objective facts. How could there be a "white hegemony" when the most dynamic prewar economies were China and India, and the largest wartime economy was unquestionably Cuba?
This is such a silly gotcha utterly deprived of any sort of context that it is honestly slightly remarkable that he didn't have it then be deployed at the conference and have the shrill "heated" delegate be stunned to utter silence and then everyone clapped, but perhaps it is just so absurd that he worried that it would strain credulity for any of those countries to not have some kind of response for it, so he left it as an outside jab, where nobody would be able to be reasonably expected to engage it, so the audience wouldn't start to think about how the other party could respond.
I just want to add on that food sources post WWZ is..... Complicated more by geopolitical barriers than prewar socioeconomic barriers.
As in WW2 Britain, most functioning governments implemented rationing of some kind that ironically increased the quality of nutrition, although this would only happen 2 years after the Panic when millions died of starvation and starvation related diseases.
Complications also rapidly emerged in that the rationing didn't meet the requirements of special populations such as infants, elderly and soldiers. The Great Offensive in particular mandated caloric intake of 5000 daily, which was extremely hard to meet on such a broad front. While governments everywhere converted their airforces to support logistics and CAS, no one had the heli lift required to supply both ground forces in the field and the civilian populations.
Overfishing destroyed entire fisheries and left subsequent populations to starve, if it wasn't for the Chinese and Vietnamese nascent aquaculture program.
Singapore new genetically selected fish such as the seabass helped feed millions, as kelongs in Indonesia, now using Solar Powered electric engines instead of fossil fuels farmed this vital protein.
Newer technologies out of Brazil such as mycofarms and etc helped distributed protein to the shattered world populations. Such concentrated farming had environmental and ecological damage, but given the defensibility of hydroponic farms or vertical farming, the relative ease of keeping our larger wildlife, these technologies once fictional due to cost are now standard, if relatively disliked by populaces due to sheer monotony.
A good old steak is much rarer than it used to be as the feedstocks that fed them has disappeared, even in nations like New Zealand that focused their feed on dairy cows.
OOC: China and Vietnam aquaculture industries shifted forward by a few years to a decade.
Ditto to Singapore selective breeding of fish like seabass. For civ 6 fans, the proper terms isnt kampung, it's Kelong. Kampung/Kampong means village. Kelong are farms and that's where the fishermen, who live in stilt houses in the sea call it.
OOC: One of the things I think is most interesting here is like, how hard manism only ever goes in one direction, towards greater suffering.
So the decision to leave most of the population to die is an acceptable hard man decision because it increases suffering.
The decision to not take the risk to go on full offensive against the zombies until they've been attrited by climate, misadventure and more limited offensive and defensive action is not, because it doesn't increase suffering.
